Collarbone Signal

When Voss arrives in Sector 7-Kappa with a mission to locate, contain, and if necessary eliminate a contamination, he expects a routine infiltration. Instead, he finds a city that seems to misremember itself, a body that acts before his mind can catch up, and a woman in a grey coat who looks like the face he should not know.Sera has been in the sector for days, tracking the same disturbance from the other side of the city. She has her own decompression errors, her own missing history, and the same impossible pull toward a stranger she has never met. When they meet, recognition is instantaneous and destabilizing. They share scars, symptoms, fragments of briefing language, and a growing sense that they are not separate operatives at all, but two projections of the same deeper system.As the city begins to flicker and degrade around them, Voss and Sera are forced to compare notes, reconstruct the rules of the sector, and confront the possibility that their attraction is not romance but architecture. The more they understand, the more the world thins. The only question left is whether they can preserve enough distance to survive, or whether the truth hidden inside their connection will collapse the projection entirely.